About

Paul Crane, Professor, General Internal Medicine, in response to the NLM Administrative Supplement, initiated contact with the UW Health Sciences Librarians to put forth a proposal to fund informationist services for his Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) research team. We met with Dr. Crane several times to learn about the research project and envision some informationist goals. The NLM proposal was not funded, nevertheless he persisted and successfully secured an Administrative Supplement to his existing R01 grant directly through the National Institute on Aging (NIA). Dr. Crane’s overarching goal is to identify AD subtypes that can help with prediction of AD conversion and also help tailor treatment of individuals with AD.

We joined the research team when they were in Year 1 of their grant funding. Then we began exploring ways to provide meaningful service to the group. Our initial activities included:

• PI provides regular update discussions on the research aims
• sit in on working meetings
• attend team lunches
• interview core research team members
• reviewed research workflow including input and output data and methods analysis
• convert research team articles to EndNote library
• identify junior team members to support
• investigate repositories for data sharing along with metadata best practices
• determining which research data can be shared

Activities evolve naturally as we become more immersed in the research team and seek relevant training opportunities and as the team members familiarize themselves with our combined skills and experience.